This is the story of our efforts to end the vicious cycle of poverty, disease, inadequate education, and early death
in a remote rural community in Lesotho, Africa, by providing quality education and life skills
to the young children there. Join us on our journey ...

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

﻿Laptops to Lesotho received a very generous Christmas donation, made in the name of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Marge and George Keller, and Marge Keller's sister, Mary Dewar. The donation was made in memory of Marge (Dewar) & George Keller, and Ruth (Dewar) & Bob Balcomb.

Dewar Sisters: Ruth Balcomb, Marge Keller, Mary Dewar

﻿

Bob & Ruth Balcomb

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Marge, George, Ruth, and Bob would be very proud of your generosity and would rejoice in your support of our work to provide a better education to the children of Lesotho. Thank you so much!

I got the following email from Tony Anderson today. He has been in Maseru the past week working with Florence Monoto. It sounds like they have accomplished a lot in a short period of time. In addition to the progress listed in this email, he also conducted training with five teachers from Ketane. Thanks Tony and Florence for all your hard work for Laptops to Lesotho!

With help from Florence, we have been able to collect the Journal logs from all but one laptop. Laptop K36 has a bad screen (defect covers right half of screen).It looks like the laptops were used throughout the year.

The Kokobe school server has all of the software. I am loading the content on the Nohana server at the moment. This will probably take most of the night (it seems to take about 14 hours for 800GB).

The primary remaining problem is to install a Flash player that Firefox 26 and the Browse activity recognize. Sugar has gnash installed which they see as a flash plugin but which does not work.

Ole Nepal has solved the problem but, unfortunately, only for the XO-4. They are still using 0.82 for the XO-1s. They also incorporate the changes in the build not by a post-install script as I am doing. I'll keep working with them until it is resolved.

The Pustakalaya library works (including the global map, full English Wikipedia plus the Simple English plus the Wiki4Schools, and Gutenberg collection). Khan Academy Lite works and includes the Khan Academy videos. These play although the IIAB versions don't - go figure. Old Time Radio works including mp3 but Talk English (also mp3) doesn't. Wiktionary works.

I installed the Learn activity because there were some problems with Browse and some of the new content. Actually, I think Firefox and Browse are on similar footing now. However, the Learn activity does allow the milestones to be downloaded. I don't have that implemented in the Browse version yet. This means that Kokobe and Nohana will have the same content as last year plus all the new stuff.

Florence will need to flash the laptops at Kokobe and Nohana when she goes. She spent most of yesterday learning the procedure.

We visited the electric store yesterday but our guy wasn't there. They have a 100w panel for 2500M which should do the job. Florence has the business card and can get the panel before leaving for Ketane.

Essentially, I think we did everything on the list (a first!). There will be some update opportunities for you when you go, especially enabling EPaath. I certainly hope and expect to have that under control by ScaleX12.